Cowardice
by Bennu
Summary: Trigun Maximum-verse one-shot. Vaguely yaoish and some fun descriptive language. Spoilers for the fate of Legato's spinal column. Elendira is her own kind of coward...


Cowardice  
by Bennu  
  
Trigun Maximum (c) Yasuhiro Nightow and Young King Ours; ie, not me.  
  
This one's for Fahji.  
  
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Call it depravity or lack of conscience, lack of empathy or even the self-hatred of too much of the same, but broken people have always disgusted me. The smell of sickness and the look of deformity makes me want to lash out and hate whoever their victim might be, to push them away lest their imperfections - inborn or gained, self-inflicted or forced - become contagious.  
  
Most people have an instinct to help the injured and diseased. I have an instinct to kill them. Quickly.  
  
I call it cowardice.  
  
His eyes are sleepless and raw-edged, the whites bloody and the irises jaundiced, thick with the frustrated tears of phantom pain. No one bothers to wash or cut his hair anymore, so it's grown wild and filthy and dark with its own oils, falling into his face with no one to brush it away. His lips are cracked and peeling. What little skin is exposed on his throat is black with bruises, pricked through with needle marks and white flecks of scar tissue.  
  
He watches with his usual silky malevolence, but without will and without ability, without even focus. Suspended in the iron shell that has become the container of his new life, the maintainer of his freshest misery, he slips in and out of caring about the world. Sometimes he stares at me and threatens with the shade of his old dulcet voice. Sometimes I answer. But mostly he's silent, or whispering soft words to himself that I don't even want to overhear.  
  
Sometimes He calls, and I'm the one who has to pry him down from the ceiling and fix him up to whatever new mode of transportation that's been conjured for him so he can answer. Then he is almost alive, eloquently cursing my name and the universe, laying pretty word upon pretty word to his Master, a disturbingly hollow mimricy of himself. I haven't had the dubious honor of seeing him actually with Him, lapping like a dog at His feet; maybe he's sane then. But I'm not quite important - or useless, perhaps - enough to be there when the great sadist and his damaged little masochist meet up at last.  
  
If He still wanted to play with His doll, I sometimes have to wonder, why did He break it so badly? To punish him? To know how much He could get away with? To put and end to what He had started, to destroy once and for all the chemistry he'd coveted between them? You can't think too much of sex when the wires going downstairs are all ripped to pieces. You can't think of much of anything when your body and mind have been trashed to hell and back by the man you love, who happens to love to hate you.  
  
In any case, I'm always the one stuck with the tab. The good Doctor used to keep him healthy, but then he had some medical concerns of his own to attend to when his guts got knifed out for talking too much. Suicidal people always make life too complicated, you know? And so here I am, babysitting the man I've spent half my life hating, tending his non-life and trying not to scream for the sheer horror of it all.  
  
He used to be so unbelievably beautiful, too. That's the sick part, the part that makes me want to vomit and run away and just pull the fucking plug on him all at once. He used to glow with his own freakish glamour and turn every head, boil men's and women's blood and the blood of everyone in between. He also used to be an insane asshole and an insufferable prick, but he was pretty enough to make me want to jump every bone in his body, and that negated even psychosis some days. Now he's still crazy and still cruel, but his beauty is marred beyond repair. It still slips through, sometimes, in the long lines of his jaw and the arch of his eyes, but it's buried by ugliness, betrayed by disease.  
  
It's the thought of the body under all of that machinery that really gets to me. I saw him naked like that once, just once. I'd just shot him through the side and reeled him in, as per the Master's orders, to drag back home. The nail had ruined his living coffin and bled him half dry, but the Doctor (not yet mincemeat at this point) had sewn him up and kept him tightly bound to the mortal coil for a little longer yet.  
  
He'd been higher than high on morphine and sleeping a sweet anethetized sleep, his corpse stretched out on an operating table and pierced by what looked like a hundred different tubes and hoses, catheters and IV drips, electrodes and wires. His skin was a recently-deserted battlefield, the fallen soldiers stitchmarks, their blood bruises, the enemy lines drawn out in white necrotic-looking scars and the red lines of ruptured arteries. His bones showed through the wasted musculature, the empty places where bronzed hard flesh had melted into nothingness. It was like seeing a ghost. A sick parody of himself, a perversion of his dignity, all that was twisted inside risen to the surface and exposed to the world.  
  
I put a gun to his head as he lay there. The muzzle fit into the hollow of his temple, pressing lightly into the red-spattered bandages that hid where he had already been shot once today. I imagined blowing his brains out right then and there, not caring what the Master would do to me or how long it would take me to die. Perhaps He would break me just like He had broken him. And then there would be no one there to mercy kill me when I was trapped in my own failed skeleton, all but a head in a jar, living in numbness.  
  
I am a coward. I admit it.  
  
He lived to wake up, and to taunt me every day with the memory of what he was and what he had once been, making me ill at the thought that he had once meant something to me, that he - what was left of him - still meant something to me now.  
  
For once, he's looking me in the eyes, the glassy yellow of them watching me watch him with a sort of weary disapproval. Some catty remark or another slips out of the dry husk of his throat, and I wish with all that remains of my soul that I'd killed him before it came to this. 


End file.
